Dry Martina
ドライ・マルティナ 〜失われた情熱を求めて〜
Storyline
The story so far; the ending is not written yet.
A washed-up Argentine singer travels to Chile chasing the one man who made her feel anything.
Martina Andrade is an Argentine singer in her late thirties who had teenage pop hits and is now attempting a comeback, singing the jazz repertoire of her late mother. In the opening scene she walks off stage mid-song and leaves in a taxi. Her father has been in a coma for a year, and she will not let him go. Her manager, Juan, is also her lover, but since the man she was with for two years left her for an office worker, she has felt no desire at all. Her cat, permanently in heat, runs away.
Francisca, a young Chilean fan, turns up at her door with her boyfriend, César, who has come to Buenos Aires for a football match. They have found the cat. Francisca believes she is Martina's half-sister: she has a photograph from the late 1980s of her father, Nacho, a writer, with the child Martina and her mother, and she wants a DNA test. Martina throws them out, but César has stirred her, and her desire comes back. She finds him after the match and they sleep together. When he goes home to Santiago, she flies after him, leaving her father in hospital.
In Chile she pursues César and, almost despite herself, is drawn into Francisca's world: her new lover, Sam, and Nacho, a successful writer, widowed and once a womaniser. One night Martina, Francisca and Sam sing together on a hill above the city. When Martina tells César in bed about her sexual past, he recoils and rejects her. She cannot keep from telling Francisca that she slept with her boyfriend, and Francisca does not stay angry for long. Before they know whether they are sisters, the two women have begun to behave like sisters. Late in the film the result of the DNA test arrives, and by then Francisca matters more to Martina than César does.
Starring
Antonella Costaas Martina Andrade
A faded Argentine pop singer in her late thirties who has lost all desire and chases it across the Andes.
Dindi Janeas Francisca
A young Chilean fan convinced that Martina is her half-sister, who wants a DNA test to prove it.
Pedro Camposas César
Francisca's young boyfriend, who wakes Martina's desire and then cannot cope with her.
Patricio Contrerasas Nacho
Francisca's father, a successful Chilean writer, widowed and once a womaniser, who may also be Martina's father.
Álvaro Espinozaas Juan
Martina's manager and occasional lover in Buenos Aires, who cannot rouse her.
Why it matters
Dry Martina takes a subject rarely given to a woman on screen, the loss of desire, and makes a comedy of it without making her the joke. Martina is past her fame, singing her dead mother's songs beside a father she cannot let die, and her body has simply stopped wanting. The film follows her appetite back to life across the Andes, and suggests that what she was missing may have been family rather than sex, a reading Antonella Costa has agreed with in interview. Chilean and Argentine critics disagreed about her. Some welcomed a complex, uninhibited heroine; others felt a male director had turned the sexually liberated woman into a sex-symbol stereotype. What the film leaves open is what desire is really attached to, and whether the loneliness underneath it can be cured by any lover.